--- title: "B2B Advertising Benchmarks 2026" url: https://metadata.io/b2b-advertising-benchmarks description: "Real B2B advertising benchmarks from $57.6M of 2025 ad spend across 153 advertisers: CTR, CPC, CPM and cost per lead by channel. Ungated, with the method." source: metadata.io --- Benchmark reference · 2025 data # B2B advertising benchmarks: CTR, CPC, CPM and cost per lead by channel Every number here comes from 153 B2B advertisers who spent $57.6M on ads in 2025 and produced 211,000 leads, in full and with no email gate. The [method is published](https://metadata.io/benchmark/methodology) and the [dataset is a CSV](https://metadata.io/benchmark/dataset) under CC BY 4.0. Comparing against what an ABM platform reports? The [6sense alternatives comparison](https://metadata.io/compare/6sense-alternatives) covers which tools measure closed-won revenue and which only measure engagement. ## What are the B2B advertising benchmarks for 2026? Across 153 B2B advertisers and $57.6M of 2025 spend: LinkedIn costs $202 per lead at a 0.67% click-through rate, Facebook $145, Instagram $138 and Google Ads $524. Every figure below carries the number of advertisers behind it. | Channel | n | CTR | CPC | CPM | Click→lead | Cost per lead | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | LinkedIn | 138 | 0.67% | $9.39 | $63.19 | 5.9% | $202 | | Facebook | 71 | 0.79% | $1.95 | $15.50 | 2.6% | $145 | | Instagram | 49 | 0.65% | $2.82 | $18.25 | 4.0% | $138 | | Google Ads | 56 | 6.33% | $9.76 | $617.91 | 1.9% | $524 | **Read CPM across channels with care.** A search impression and a feed impression are not the same unit, so Google Ads’ $617.91 CPM is not “ten times worse” than LinkedIn’s $63.19. It is arithmetic: a $9.76 click at a 6.33% click-through rate produces that CPM. Compare CPM within a channel type, and compare cost per lead across them. ## What is a good CTR for B2B ads? On B2B paid social, a good click-through rate is roughly 0.65%–0.80%. The 2025 medians are 0.79% on Facebook, 0.67% on LinkedIn and 0.65% on Instagram. Paid search is a different game entirely: Google Ads runs 6.33%, because the click follows a stated intent. The practical implication is that CTR is close to useless as a cross-channel scorecard. A team moving budget from LinkedIn to Google because “the CTR is 9x better” is comparing a feed interruption to a search result. Judge a channel on cost per lead, and judge creative on CTR *within* its own channel. ## What are the B2B Google Ads benchmarks? In this dataset B2B Google Ads runs a 6.33% click-through rate at $9.76 a click, converting 1.9% of clicks into leads for $524 per lead, n=56 advertisers. It buys the most expensive leads here and the most intent-qualified ones. These are materially different from the figures most B2B teams still quote. The most-cited public benchmark for B2B search is WordStream’s industry table, whose B2B row reports a 2.41% CTR at a $3.33 CPC, drawn from client data first collected in 2015. Search auction prices have moved a long way in ten years, and a 2015 CPC is not a 2026 planning input. ## What does a B2B lead cost on each channel? Each channel has its own page with the full cut: [LinkedIn](https://metadata.io/linkedin-ads-cost-b2b) carries the p10-to-p90 cost-per-lead spread, [Google Ads](https://metadata.io/google-ads-cost-b2b) explains why the same click price yields a lead at two and a half times the cost, and [Meta](https://metadata.io/meta-ads-cost-b2b) compares Facebook against Instagram. The [head-to-head paid social comparison](https://metadata.io/benchmark/head-to-head-comparison-of-the-performance-of-the-major-paid-social-channels) puts LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram side by side on every media metric. Cost per lead in 2025: Instagram $138, Facebook $145, LinkedIn $202, Google Ads $524. Company size moves it as much as channel: 51–200-employee targets cost $241 versus $204 for 1,001–5,000. A cheaper lead is not automatically a better one. The same dataset shows the cheapest leads and the cheapest customers are frequently not on the same channel, which is the argument the [full 2026 benchmark report](https://metadata.io/benchmark-report-2026) takes apart. ## Which ad format produces the cheapest B2B leads? On LinkedIn, document ads. They produce leads at $142, against $200 for image, $265 for video and $362 for conversation ads. Document ads are the cheapest format in the set and the least used. | Ad format | Cost per lead | |---|---| | Document ads | $142 | | Image ads | $200 | | Video ads | $265 | | Conversation ads | $362 | Where the ad sends people matters about as much as what it is. A LinkedIn lead-gen form produces a lead for $193; sending the same click to a landing page costs $346. ## Do retargeting audiences produce cheaper B2B leads? Not on LinkedIn. Retargeting there costs $234 per lead against $194 for prospecting. The warm audience is the dearer one. On Facebook the expected pattern holds: $120 retargeting versus $166 prospecting. | Channel | Prospecting | Retargeting | |---|---|---| | LinkedIn | $194 | $234 | | Facebook | $166 | $120 | ## What is B2B advertising? B2B advertising is paid media bought to reach people at other companies, on LinkedIn, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Reddit and increasingly inside LLM assistants. It differs from consumer advertising in that the buyer is a committee, the sales cycle runs months, and the metric that matters is pipeline created rather than an immediate sale. ## How were these benchmarks calculated? From 153 B2B advertisers running paid media through Metadata in calendar 2025, $57.6M of spend and 211,000 leads. Figures are spend-weighted aggregates, not averages of advertiser averages. A cut is published only with at least 5 advertisers, $50,000 of spend, and no single advertiser above half of it. Cuts that fail those thresholds are absent rather than zeroed, so a missing row means suppressed, not nil. The [full methodology](https://metadata.io/benchmark/methodology), including every number this report has withdrawn and why, is public. So is the [anonymized dataset](https://metadata.io/benchmark/dataset), 111 published cuts, CC BY 4.0. For the customer-acquisition view of this same dataset, segmented by company size, channel and audience approach, see [B2B customer acquisition cost benchmarks by company size](https://metadata.io/resources/blog/6-ways-to-lower-your-customer-acquisition-cost-cac-in-2024).